Disinfection of skin or wounds is necessary before further handling or treatment of the same. In clinical applications, such as in surgery disinfection of the area to be treated, e.g. of the skin, is essential. Usually, before surgery the disinfection of skin is conducted as follows. As a preliminary cleaning step, the skin is treated with wash lotions or solutions the day before. In the operation theatre a disinfectant is applied with sterile swabs to the area where incision is to be performed and to the surrounding skin. The disinfection is applied at least two times for several minutes to ensure complete disinfection. Afterwards, the excessive disinfectant is removed with dry sterile swabs.
In practice the surgeon or the nurse puts an undefined number of sterile swabs in a bowl containing an undefined amount of disinfectant. The swabs are taken out of the bowl with a forceps one by one and are used for applying the disinfection to the skin surface. In case the disinfectant in the bowl or the number of swabs is not sufficient to cover the whole surface area twice, additional soaked swabs have to be prepared with disinfectant as necessary.
Thus, the pre-surgical disinfection of the skin surface is a laborious work which is not standardized and in all probability will be handled differently in each institution. Further, it is neither possible to define the volume of the disinfectant nor the number of swabs needed for the disinfection of a certain area of the skin. Therefore, the presently conducted method for pre-surgical disinfection is time consuming, costly and non-standardized. Moreover, since usually the swabs or sponges are saturated with more disinfectant than necessary, the disinfectant tends to flow down or drop down from the skin and, therefore, must be absorbed by adsorbing material. Furthermore, the disinfectant may drop on the floor which may lead to slipping of staff.
Since, in Germany more than one million infections per year occur in hospitals disinfection and/or sterilization is a major point in surgery and other treatments involving a surgical intervention. Moreover, some 20% of the infections occurring in hospitals are due to post-surgical wound infections. This is in part due to undefined standards for skin disinfection.
Therefore, the aim of the present invention is the provision of a disinfection system allowing a defined, comparable and inexpensive disinfection of skin and wounds, thus, not only reducing the costs but also the risk of post-surgical wound infections.